Fate

When something that you hate happens not once, but twice within a week, what do you call it?

FATE?

Well last weekend, I wanted to rebuild the partitions on my hard disk. Actually I wanted to remove 3 separate 30 GB partitions and create a single large partition. I deleted the 30GB partitions in windows and rebooted. But my comp was never able to boot into windows or linux after that. It said grub error 22 and the bootloader failed to initialize. Well this has happened before. So I promptly took out my SuSE DVD and tried to reinstall grub.

"Unable to write to /boot/...."

Damn!!! WTF

So I was not able to reinstall grub. Somehow I managed to install the windows bootloader later and windows was up and running again. But I had just written code for one of my assignments the previous day and it was on the linux partition. I could not place a backup of the code on the department server as the network was having problems the previous day. Fuck!!

Luckily, I had some intermediate version of the code in my mailbox. So I would have to make the additional changes only. This was the first instance of what I call FATE.

The second one occurred yesterday. I had to submit a lab assignment for the compilers course yesterday night at 9 (Monday). Our group started working on the assignment on Saturday. Well we actually had to fix bugs in our previous assignment to start work on this assignment. So that part took us all the time till Sunday night. So a night out on Sunday was inevitable. We stayed in the DCF till 5:30 in the morning and managed to finish quite a bit of the work. Finally we thought we must take a break, so we decided to continue working on the code later during the day after the classes got over. We had been storing all the code on my account all the while. One of my teammates wanted to copy the code to his account as he had a much older version of the code. He used the typical scp command to do this. He asked me to enter the password and I did that. We happily left the lab after that. I went back later in the morning to the lab to continue working on the code. That is when I noticed that something strange was happening. The code was not even compiling fine. I looked up the file and saw that all the changes were lost.

My teammate had scp'ed from his account to mine instead of the mine to his.... And I, being already tired and sleepy just entered my password without seeing the command.

Shit!!! Lost assignment code for the second time.

Luckily, the lab submition deadline was extended to later this week as most groups had not finished. So hopefully we can manage to fix the code to some decent shape

Amidst all this, I got a message yesterday that there will be a midsem today.

I had not attended classes for well over a month in that course - which meant I had to mug from scratch. A night out was the only option.

Fuck.... How was I to manage another successive night out. And to make things worse, the exam today was scheduled for 8:30 PM. So I had to stay awake that much longer and also be relatively active while writing the exam.

Somehow I managed night out number 2 in succession yesterday. There was so much to mug that there was no way I could have made it even if I did not crash at all. Anyway I decided to give it my best shot and stayed awake throughout, mugging away for most of the time. I also attended a couple of classes in between.

Finally at 8:30 I went to the class and the prof promptly came and said it would be a 'Take home quiz'. Damn it!!! The good thing was I had not managed to mug completely and this would give me some time to read up and also refer to the book while writing the paper, but the bad thing was that it meant I need to virtually put another night out if I have to complete it in time for the class tomorrow.

No way... I have slept for only 3 1/2 hours in the past 63 hours and there is no chance of me managing another night out.

I am already halucinating and I can hardly make out what I am writing here. I'd better get some sleep now...